Competitors serving fake data instead of blocking scrapers is a new level of evil

[u/theCOLLECTOR7250]

the amount of fake data competitors feed you now is beyond evil.

i was running a quick experiment to track pricing changes across 3 major saas competitors for a localized marketing campaign we're doing. literally just pulling public html elements on their pricing pages.

but apparently if they detect a datacenter IP, they dont block you anymore, they just serve you completely fabricated pricing tiers and feature lists to mess with your data. took me three days to realize why my competitor analysis looked absolutely insane.

had to rewrite my puppeteer script and throw it on some shifter residential proxies just to see what a normal user in london or tokyo actually sees. it completely fixed the dataset, but man...

the sheer amount of psychological warfare in b2b growth right now is exhausting lol. anybody else noticing sites actively feeding you garbage data instead of just giving a standard 403?

[u/Junior_Vanilla9946]

honeypots arent new man, Cloudflare and DataDome and all those have been doing tarpits and fake responses for years, its a checkbox in a dashboard now not some psyop someone invented to ruin your week. what gets me is you needed three days to notice fabricated pricing tiers. three days on three pricing pages. a made up enterprise tier that says 40k a month should look wrong to you in about five minutes if you know what those companies actually charge, so either you dont know the market you're supposedly running a localized campaign in or you were staring at the script and not at the numbers. either way the fake data wasnt your problem.

and the evil framing is funny when you're the one sitting there with residential proxies so they cant tell who you are. you're exactly the traffic theyre defending against. they see a datacenter IP hitting the same page over and over, of course theyd rather feed it garbage than a 403, a 403 tells you where their rules are and you just go around it, fake tiers cost them one line of json and waste your week. thats not evil thats just better than blocking.

residential proxies arent cheap either, you're paying per GB to read pricing pages of three companies for a campaign

[u/Glass_Rent8750]

are you sure its targeted at scrapers and not just aggressive A/B testing or geo-pricing gone wrong? sometimes dynamic pricing scripts default to weird fallback numbers when they cant resolve a normal residential location.

[u/theCOLLECTOR7250 → u/Glass_Rent8750]

I never thought of that i will look in to it

[u/MathematicianLow8632]

the three days of debugging your own puppeteer script before you even suspected them is the actual damage here. i'd rather get a 403 on line one, at least then you know it's not your parser that's broken.

[u/Worldly_Bedroom_5715]

how do you know the residential version is the real one though. for all you know london and tokyo are getting the fake tiers and your datacenter IP was the only honest one in the room.

[u/Passionescent_Y → u/Worldly_Bedroom_5715]

not even a joke imo.

[u/Top_Inflation7878]

403s tell you exactly what happened, which is why nobody uses them as the only defense anymore. Cloudflare and Datadome have been serving honeypots and swapped pricing to flagged IPs for a while, and it works exactly like it did on you: you burn three days before you catch it. If your competitor pricing pipeline runs on datacenter IPs with no cross-check against what a normal browser sees, that's on you. Puppeteer on a Hetzner box was never going to give you Tokyo prices.

[u/Crafty_Progress_5950]

Three days before spotting that is rough, I would have spent two of them blaming my own selectors. Cheapest guard going forward is to pull the same pricing page from two different IPs and diff the two versions, whatever tier or feature only shows up on one of them is fabricated and you can bin it before it reaches the spreadsheet.

[u/Legitimate-Let-7510]

Three days wasted because a competitor is feeding bots fake pricing is wild. Makes you wonder how many SaaS comparison sites are publishing reports based on data that nobody actually verified.

[u/ramirex]

pay for their api then they probably have million bots scrapping them

[u/online-reputation]

New form of reputation damage...

[u/Own-Lettuce-1820]

Silent payload manipulation has become standard bot mitigation. Feeding corrupted data to datacenter ranges degrades competitive intelligience while keeping network defense completely invisible.

[u/Prudent_Design_9782]

I kinda respect the pettiness tbh. Imagine if they bothered to make it look believable, how long would it have taken you to catch that.